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Thursday, August 20, 2009

Career Change

Typically people go through a career change somewhere in their 30's or so after spending numerous years slaving away at something they are not in love with. At least that is how I always saw it. After college (well really during my senior year of college) I thought about what I wanted to do with my life and what seemed to be the best option was to continue studying philosophy and see what kind of job I could do with that at the very least. Very quickly I packed up, moved to the Boulder, CO area and started as a master's candidate in Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I love philosophy. I love the reading, the thinking, the curious problems we spend time dealing with. Most of all I love the diverse range of topics studied for philosophers along with our ability to use what is happening in other fields as fuel for thought.

Unfortunately it seems that not only am I less motivated to continue with philosophy as a career move but I have been missing one aspect of my college career far too much, design. As a student at Bard College though I was a philosophy major I spent a large amount of time in the theatre working for the electrics crew. My capacity was doing everything from hanging lighting instruments to focusing and finally in the last couple of years to designing for various dance and theatre shows around campus. My greatest accomplishment by far was making the Spanish Dance Concerts in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR, though we called it the NPR, No-Purpose Room, for it's completely useless layout for anything whatsoever) look good. Which is nearly impossible if you are remotely familiar with this room and the constraints one must work with.

Not having done any design work for over a year now I realize that maybe my love for philosophy is slightly trumped by my love for projects that involve interesting physical challenges to design around, like working on dance concert lighting designs.

After talking with many family members and friends as well as my other half (Shannon) it seems that after I finish my master's in philosophy I will be making a drastic shift to the world of engineering.

Yes, this is a huge shift from my previous academic exploits. However, I was never a philosophy major because I was a weak math and/or science student (very important subjects for engineers). In fact I have always been a very good math and science student. Unfortunately this also means I have to go back to Undergrad to make up a number of courses I neglected while being an undergrad at Bard College in order to apply for Grad School again in another year or two.

Well, I guess it is back to the books in the next week. Time to figure out what to write my Master's Thesis on before I start thinking about remembering how to do Calculus.